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2016 election: It is the economy

This presidential election has all the earmarks of a tragic tipping point in American history.

Look at it from this perspective. More than half the US population on a county-by-county basis have their hands out to Washington and the states. They are not working, they are collecting a check from government. Social Security disablement, unemployment, food stamps or early retirement checks are their jobs.

Another large segment are greeters at Walmart — and or — asking you if you want fries with that. Once proud workers now try to put together a 40 hour work week between two and three minimum wage jobs with no benefits.

But New York, Washington and Los Angeles ignore this problem, so you are not seeing it on the TV screen.

The people in this country are suffering — but they are in fly-over country. When the talking heads on TV say they don’t understand the popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, they admit they are clueless about the middle of America.

These people need help desperately — before they become the welfare mothers of the 1970s. Living day-to-day on handouts without a thought of working. Multiple generations on the public dole.

Incredibly, there is a bill making its way through Congress to pay once proud middle class people a stipend to take a lesser paying job, when they lose their good paying jobs.

Are you kidding me. It’s gotten so bad economically we have to resort to this. Socialism at its lowest form. Paying people for not performing at their peak.

We are eight years into anemic growth in the US. Even in the Great Depression we had better economic growth in some quarters than we have now.

This is a direct result of not allowing companies fail. It’s not capitalism if you take failure out of the equation. If you prop up zombie firms, you get the type of economic growth we have experienced since the Great Recession.

Yes Washington kept the ATMs working in 2008, but look at the long-term costs. Entrepreneurship has been squashed outside of the small pockets of tech companies, business lending is at one of the lowest points in history and all the Fed can do is jawbone about inflation targets, because it’s scared shitless (excuse the language) about the coming disinflation.

Into this fray, we have the presidential conventions in sweltering July in Cleveland for the Republicans and Philadelphia for the Democrats.

We very well could be teetering on a recession by then. Q1 GDP could easily be negative, once all the data is in, which will be the end of June, and we could have bad readings for Q2 by the time the gavels go down.

Look, Japan is working on its third “lost decade” of anemic growth. The US is following the Japanese game plan, so far with little to show for it.

Listen, I don’t have all the answers, but I do see a path where the US can lift itself out of the doldrums.

Economic policy has to change. The rubric that Washington props up failing financial institutions at the expense of the US worker has to stop.

Cheap money for Wall Street is not trickling down to Main Street because the large banks need to keep it on their crippled balance sheets.

Have the guts to say, the next trillion spent by the Fed goes to middle America in the form of public works and infrastructure jobs.

Congress won’t legislate that spending, so it has to come from the Fed. Put the money in the hands of the people and you will see 3% growth quarter over quarter.

The American people want to work, still. But if we continue down the socialist path for the next decade or so, we may find ourselves with millions of families who only know how to hold out their hand.